Week end

So, what have I been up to since Thursday?

Well, Thursday evening I went out to the pub quiz. We didn’t win anything this week.

Friday morning I got my old bike ready for the road by oiling it up and putting new brake pads on the rear. At this point I noticed that I need a new rim on my back wheel as it’s really badly worn by the brakes. On one side it worn down by a good 2mm but on the other it’s more 4mm, so the wall of the rim is probably paper-thin now! I also tried to replace the pedals but couldn’t get the old ones off.

In work, it was the day all the new postgrads and undergrads get inducted, or induced, so it was pretty busy.

Saturday started with getting up at about 9am and driving into Witney to get a hair cut. I timed it just right as the barbers was empty and I walked straight in and got the hair cut. The person cutting my hair told me that it had been the first break she’d had all morning.

Then it was into Oxford, where I had a latte and wandered around the shops. I picked up three CDs in Virgin Megastore’s sale. Also, having decided that although my iPod Shuffle is fine a lot of the time, there are times when I’d like to choose what to listen to, so I splurged out on an 8GB iPod Nano. The price in Dixons^H^H^H^H^H^HCurrys.digital is the same as on the High Education Apple web site (I think Apple have woken up to students prefering to buy iPods from the HE web shop).

Yesterday afternoon, evening and this morning I started playing with the latest version of the Mandriva Linux distribution. My first impressions? Well, gratuitous changes (such as moving autofs stuff from /etc into is own sub-directory which will break lots of set-up scripts), lots of show stopping bugs (such as CD/DVD writing not working and the default 3D X server desktop preventing logins) and a new degree of annoying automatic “updating” of system files such as /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf. I’m not positively impressed.

I finally managed to get the new petals on the old bike after buying a set of open ended spanners. However, it needed more than just a spanner to get the old pedals off though. I needed a hammer a lot of muscle work to get them to budge. The first one took a few hits before it eased but the otherone needed about 5 minutes of heavy bashing before the thing even started to move and then kept needing the hammer until the thread was almost completely out.

This afternoon I managed to get out and cut the grass in the back garden. It was quite a job as it’s not been cut for a good 5 weeks now and was as many inches tall. Still, that’s done now.

Time to get ready for the first week of term now then.